New Year, Old Cautionary Tales: What Can Films Set in 2026 Teach Us?

The year 2025 could appear more futuristic. Perhaps it's the sound of the consonant "f" in "five". But 2026 represents a leap forward, and it's where we currently stand, with each futuristic advancement – primarily the widespread adoption of AI – seeming bleak, or perhaps more grim. (It often seems like in a proper dystopia, the mind-dulling corporate-sponsored anti-human technology might operate a bit better?) Did no one warn us regarding this?

The response, at least regarding science fiction films made long ago (or sometimes recently) set in 2026, is both yes and no. A number of those warnings are broadly applicable (global catastrophe) but specifically far-fetched (if humanity is inevitably decimated, we will almost certainly take the ape population with us). Others of them are visionary; others just look like bad green screen. But it's worth examining where various film-makers, ranging from masters to journeymen, believed we'd be positioned by this time in the world's evolution. So let's take a look a selection of the films that have been set in 2026 over the years and see if they have anything to impart.

The Game 'Doom'

Well, this doesn't bode well. According to the game-to-film translation *Doom*, whose two-decade milestone was noted by hardly anyone, 2026 is the year that humanity discovers a gateway to an ancient city on Mars, where the inhabitants of Earth are able to set up a research facility. Now, the bad stuff – in terms of plot and concerning over-the-top cinematic imitations of a FPS video game – does not actually transpire for another 20 years later, so should we do discover a Martian gateway now, we might have some time to avoid catastrophe. Were we to uncover a passageway to an old Martian city, it's truly hard to determine whether Elon Musk would remain super-psyched to send everyone to Mars or would immediately turn disheartened that the discovery wasn't something he personally paid for, allowing him to claim savior-like ownership for humanity's expansion into the stars. That's before we consider the harvesting of extraterrestrial genetics and resulting mutations into monstrous beings. (Once more, this is nearer 2046, not to be confused with the acclaimed director's film.) Overall, *Doom* is (if nothing else) a useful example for why, exactly we let Mars serve as a stretch-goal aspiration for humanity. Be it in John Carpenter's cheap-looking genre hybrid *Ghosts of Mars*, the more grounded sci-fi of *Red Planet*, or the woo-woo spiritualism of *Mission to Mars*, our far-off planet doesn't tend to serve as a symbol of hope. If anyone wants to close that dubious red-planet property deal, maybe they ought to begin with first making the fantasy version look good.

Marvel's Lesser Offerings

A of the goofiest quirks of the present Marvel Cinematic Universe is how to account for the multiple world-threatening disasters, encompassing a five-year time-jump whose events are largely not shown in the films themselves; the movies have become like a alarm clock perpetually set a few minutes fast – except with minutes, it's years. So there's a large assortment of MCU content that various wikis clarify to be taking place in 2026. The better entries, like *Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3* and the underappreciated romp *The Marvels*, occur distant from Earth, and so feel quite detached from any concrete sense of time. However the poorer material is some of the worst the studio has created: the nonsensically meandering TV show *Secret Invasion* and the remote-meeting debacle of *Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania*. Judging by this stuff, we're in for a whole lot of annoying wheel-spinning in 2026, along with the related spin that in truth, this confusing mess unfolding in front of us is crucial to whatever happens next. Even worse, in the actual world that assertion will likely prove correct.

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

The majority of the original five-film *Planet of the Apes* cycle is set in the more distant tomorrow of Earth, but the modern series that began with 2011’s *Rise of the Planet of the Apes* begins nearer the present, starting its chronology approximately 2016. Thus, when a pathogen that knocks out most of Earth’s human population has run its course, and simultaneously boosted the cognitive abilities of apes, it’s merely 2026, with further human indignities (and simian triumphs) ahead. The post-credits scene of *Rise*, depicting how rapidly this virus propagates around the world and taking place in 2019, appears profoundly unsettling in the wake of the actual pandemic that would dawn in 2020. In contrast, the movie *Dawn* seems more abstract; if you can believe it, we’re already half a decade from the onset of Covid-19, and humanity, though obviously wounded by the still-spreading virus, was not wiped out, and our technology certainly hasn't been disabled. Yet this bleakest of the four contemporary *Apes* movies (at least so far!) nonetheless contains a substantial bummer to offer, suggesting that the fundamental nature of beings, however one defines either, will inevitably result in warfare, no matter the efforts of the most well-meaning individuals. We’re subject to the whims of those who appeal to others’ baser impulses, although those drives are not held by the majority. Currently, it seems hard to dispute that, despite the fact that we probably should.

The Silent Classic

Easily the most prominent depiction of 2026 in cinema is from a movie close to marking its centennial. Fritz Lang’s silent classic *Metropolis* is set in a city of tomorrow where wealthy industrialists preside over the towers as workers toil underground on the equipment that keep everything running. Affluent surface resident Freder, son of the city’s ruler, has his perspective changed to these enormous social gaps when he falls for Maria, an underground activist who advocates for a reconciliation of the two halves of Metropolis. A inventor with darker plans creates a robot in her image, aiming to bring the entire Metropolis to ruin. In this narrative, a machine designed to mimic a human isn't a tool of the ruling corporate class, but an entity who desires to see them destroyed; it's one element inverted by reality in a future that in other ways seems to be well on its way. *Metropolis* also imagines a world where advanced machinery depends on old-fashioned human toil, which appears as a perfect union of rightwing disdain for “the working class” and corporate zeal for an tech boom. It hasn't yet come to pass, but it's easy to imagine a slightly less stylish-looking iteration of Lang’s city expanding out with the promise of a return to industrial production. The more complex, less plausible accomplishment is the ending of the film, where the gap between the haves and the poor is bridged with love; rather than with specific policies. Like *Dawn of the Planet of the Apes*, the movie advocates coexistence; in contrast to *Dawn*, it seems optimistic about the possibility